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The two types of predicate clefts: Classical Hebrew and beyond
... Three approaches can be taken on this issue: (i) FACOs are nominal, (ii) FACOs are verbal, or (iii) FACOs are category-neutral, in the sense of Marantz (1997). In this paper, I will adopt the first approach; the second approach is taken in the religious tradition of Biblical text analysis; and in generative linguistics, by Harbour (1999). ...
... Note also that other arguments for the verbal status of FACOs put forward by Harbour (1999) are seriously weakened when a distinction is drawn between arg-COs and adv-COs, which I have shown to be necessary on independent grounds. Thus, Harbour (1999:164) claims that "cognate nouns behave differently from cleft forms" (i.e., FACOs in my terminology). ...
This paper is part of a larger project of comparative research on cognate objects; some previous findings are presented in
Pereltsvaig (1999a, b). It is also a continuation of decades-long research on cognate objects in both traditional and Generative
linguistics. In (1) and (2) below, I give some examples of cognate objects (COs) in familiar languages such as English and
French (these languages are quite well-studied in terms of their cognate object constructions). Here and below, COs are in
bold.
... Cheng 2007Cheng , 2017. In a variety of languages, predicate fronting can create verb copying constructions (for instance, Russian (Abels 2001), Classical Hebrew (Harbour 1999), Haitian (Harbour 2008), Modern Hebrew (Landau 2006), among many others), where a higher VP is pronounced in the clausal left periphery, and another VP is spelled out in a lower position. ...
To appear in Proceedings of WCCFL41
... For this reason, the examples selected for discussion in this section relate primarily to syntax. The focus on syntax, however, should not detract from the fact that generative linguistics has developed and contributed to other linguistic subdisciplines (e.g., phonology, morphology, semantics, pragmatics), which have also benefitted Biblical Hebrew. 2 2 These linguistic subdisciplines include: phonology and morphology (e.g., Prince 1975;Rappaport 1984;McCarthy 1985McCarthy [1979Malone 1993;Dresher 1994;Churchyard 1999;Coetzee 1999;DeCaen 2003;Dresher 2009a;2009b;Himmelreich and Bat-El Foux 2021); phonological aspects of the Masoretic accentual system (e.g., Dresher 1994; DeCaen and Dresher 2021; Pitcher 2021); and the morphology, syntax, and semantics/pragmatics of the Biblical Hebrew verbal system and verb phrase (e.g., DeCaen 1995;Hatav 1997;DeCaen 1999;Harbour 1999;Pereltsvaig 2002;Hatav 2004;Holmstedt 2009; ...
This volume is the result of the 2021 session of the Linguistics and the Biblical Text research group of the Institute for Biblical Research, which addresses the history, relevance, and prospects of broad theoretical linguistic frameworks in the field of biblical studies. Cognitive Linguistics, Functional Grammar, generative linguistics, historical linguistics, complexity theory, and computational analysis are each allotted a chapter, outlining the key theoretical commitments of each approach, their major concepts and/or methods, and their important contributions to contemporary study of the biblical text.
As academic disciplines and academic publishing proliferate and become more complex in a digital and global context, synthesising volumes such as this one have taken on new importance for both specialists and generalists alike. That is particularly the case in interdisciplinary areas of research. This volume therefore sets out to make linguistic theory clearer and more accessible to biblical scholars in particular, not only by careful explanation but also by specific illustration, drawing upon ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek languages within the Christian biblical corpus. The volume assists the reader in distinguishing the separate assumptions and scope of study for the separate theories, recognising methods of approach that can be applied to any of the theories, and the role of an umbrella theory to enable all the others to fruitfully interact.
The bibliographies provided are structured for the non-specialist, noting handbooks, companions, and glossaries, general introductions, and foundational texts.
In so doing, this volume presents not only a fully up-to-date cross-section of linguistic research in biblical scholarship but also an explicit path into the field, while highlighting important avenues for continued investigation and collaboration.
... Our analysis of VPE extends straightforwardly to VP-fronting, often referred to as predicate clefting (e.g., Koopman 1984, Davis and Prince 1986, Harbour 1999, Abels 2001, Cable 2004, Landau 2006, Vicente 2007, Hein 2018. The two phenomena affect pronunciation of the verb in parallel fashion. ...
We propose a theory of head displacement that replaces traditional Head Movement and Lowering with a single syntactic operation of Generalized Head Movement. We argue that upward and downward head displacement have the same syntactic properties: cyclicity, Mirror Principle effects, feeding upward head displacement, and being blocked in the same syntactic configurations. We also study the interaction of head displacement and other syntactic operations, arguing that claimed differences between upward and downward displacement are either spurious or follow directly from our account. Finally, we show that our theory correctly predicts the attested crosslinguistic variation in verb and inflection doubling in predicate clefts.
... Structure (67b) then 52 There is a some variability across languages with respect to the degree to which the two verbal elements in a predicate cleft pattern must match. Harbour (1999) makes clear that the analogous pattern in Classical Hebrew makes possible a greater degree of mismatch than Modern Hebrew; this includes mismatches in the derivational (voice) morphology. Classical Hebrew is of further relevance to us for the way in which it apparently involves a nontrivial interaction between what appears to be syntactic and postsyntactic head movement (Harbour 2007). ...
We argue that head movement, as an operation that builds head-adjunction structures in the syntax, has been used to model two empirically distinct classes of phenomena. One class has to do with displacement of heads (fully formed morphological words) to higher syntactic positions, and includes phenomena like verb second and verb initiality. The other class has to do with the construction of complex morphological words and is involved in various types of word formation. Based on the very different clusters of properties associated with these two classes of phenomena, we argue that they each should be accounted for by distinct grammatical operations, applying in distinct modules of the grammar, rather than by the one traditional syntactic head movement operation. We propose that the operation responsible for upward displacement of heads is genuine syntactic movement (Internal Merge) and has the properties of syntactic phrasal movement, including the ability to affect word order, the potential to give rise to interpretive effects, and the locality associated with Internal Merge. On the other hand, word formation is the result of postsyntactic amalgamation, realized as either Lowering (Embick and Noyer 2001) or its upward counterpart, Raising. This operation, we argue, has properties that are not associated with narrow syntax: it is morphologically driven, it results in word formation, it does not exhibit interpretive effects, and it has stricter locality conditions (the Head Movement Constraint). The result is a view of head movement that not only accounts for the empirical differences between the two classes of head movement phenomena, but also lays to rest numerous perennial theoretical problems that have heretofore been associated with the syntactic head adjunction view of head movement. In addition, the framework developed here yields interesting new predictions with respect to the expected typology of head movement patterns.
... This form of "predicate doubling" according to Hiraiwa (2005a, b) is one common but significant feature of PCC cross-linguistically. He argues, by adopting and further elaborating on Abels (2001) and Harbour (1999) that verb-doubling in PCC is as a result of an interface condition. Abels (2001) proposes that verb-doubling is due to a morphological principle. ...
... The hypothesis I defend in this section is that this is a category structurally higher than the merger site of the internal arguments of the verb. This is an important conclusion, as it shows that one cannot resort to an analysis where the moving category is argued to be a RootP-that is, the bare verb root, below the level where the internal argument is merged (see, e.g., Harbour 1999 for justification of the latter analysis in Classical Hebrew). ...
One of the main tenets of transformational grammar is that movement processes affect heads and phrases in different ways. In this article, I argue against this claim and propose that heads should be allowed to move in the same way as phrases. Conceptually, this proposal is the logical consequence of a common set of assumptions about syntax in general and movement in particular. Empirically, it finds support in the Spanish predicate cleft construction.
Despite the relatively scarce literature on the topic and the lack of terminological consensus among scholars, Cognate Infinitives (CI) have been identified to share formal and functional characteristics across Semitic. The present study provides a description of the formal features of Cognate Infinitives in Lebanese Arabic (LA) based on the analysis of linguistic data gathered through a participant observation method. The novelty of this description lies in its comparative approach, which has been developed in the light of the Semitic evidence available, gathered through a review of the main literature available on the topic. The results of this comparative analysis reveal that the grammatical features of Cognate Infinitives in Lebanese Arabic seem to be in line with general Semitic trends that do not, however, always find their parallel in prescriptive descriptions of Cognate Infinitives in Classical or Standard Arabic.
This article discusses the development of verbal predicate fronting (“predicate cleft”) in Modern Hebrew by comparing its properties with those of analogous constructions in Classical Hebrew and Yiddish, a critical contact language. The evidence, largely syntactic, lends support for contact-induced change as a plausible source of verbal predicate fronting in the contemporary spoken variety.
Haitian’s well studied predicate cleft and its unstudied predicate reduplication are closely related: the former derives from the latter by A-bar movement of one reduplicant. This claim solves two long standing problems of the construction (why, apparently, this A-bar movement targets a head and leaves no gap). Moreover, it predicts novel restrictions on when predicate clefts are possible and makes possible a straightforward formalization of their semantics.
Emphatic verb doubling, developed as a diagnostic of T-to-C movement in Classical Hebrew, demonstrates that discontinuous agreement is not a consequence of movement to between hypothetical Person and Number phrases.
The copy theory of movement receives the strongest form of support from instances of movement leaving phonetically visible copies. Such is the case in Hebrew V(P)-fronting, where the fronted verb surfaces as an infinitive, and its “trace” is pronounced as an inflected verbal copy. This paper argues that V-doubling is explained by the same algorithm that determines pronunciation of single copies in canonical chains. The phonetic resolution of chains is PF-internal, strictly local, and need not appeal to cross-interface recoverability constraints. Crosslinguistic variation in predicate clefts largely reflects different morpho-phonological strategies of realizing the fronted predicate head.
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